Research Papers Issue RP0271 How do heat waves, cold waves, December 2015 droughts, hail and tornadoes affect ECIP – Economic analysis of Climate US agriculture? Impacts and Policy Division By Emanuele Massetti SUMMARY We estimate the impact of extreme events on corn and Georgia Institute of Technology, soybeans yields, and on agricultural land values in the Eastern United CESIfo and States. We find the most harmful event is a severe drought but that cold Fondazione CMCC – Centro waves, heat waves, and storms all reduce both corn and soybean yields. Euro -Mediterraneo sui Over 80% of the damage from extreme events is caused by droughts and Cambiamenti Climatici cold waves with heat waves causing only 6% of the damage. Including FEEM – Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei extreme events in a panel model of weather alters how temperature emanuele.massetti@ affects yields, making cold temperature more harmful and hot pubpolicy.gatech.edu temperatures less harmful. Extreme events have no effect on farmland values probably because American farmers are buffered from extreme events by subsidized public crop insurance. Robert Mendelsohn Yale University
[email protected] Keywords Climate change, agriculture, extreme events, heat waves, droughts. JEL codes: Q1, Q54 This report represents the Deliverable P152 developed within the framework of Work Package 7.1.3 of the GEMINA project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and the Italian Ministry of Environment, Land and Sea. CMCC Research Papers 1. INTRODUCTION 02 There is a large literature that studies how climate and weather affect agricultural productivity using a wide range of methods: large agro-economic models that combine atmospheric science, plant science and agricultural economics (Adams et al.